Friday, December 25, 2015

Your Home is Your Castle

As the elites desperately try to centralize and homogenize us.  Technology allows us to stay a step ahead.  This is becoming ever clearer in the home.  For rural communities it is now a reality, and increasingly so for the suburban family.

It all started with solar hot water, for the home and the pool. This technology is over 100 years old, and used quite a bit before utility gas replaced it.  Now the systems are very space efficient and durable.

The next wave to hit the home was the advent of the internet.  This technology I am excited about for the purpose of this post is the ability to telecommute, shop, bank, trade, and shop online.  It is no accident that Amazon, Ebay, Google, NetFlix, Hulu, and Priceline are such a success.  The additional benefit is our ability to sidestep the parasitic middlemen that add no value, but occupied a crossroad.
I have to look no further than my own home to see this in action.  We shop 90% online, we watch 90% of our movies online, and we both work out of our homes, saving considerable amounts infrastructure and fuel costs, and work for ourselves because technology allows it.  The internet of everything will continue to open new frontiers in the coming years.

Then solar panels for electricity became economical, and now we have an alternative to the utility monopoly.  Although the Utilities are fighting hard to force you into being a captive customer, the next technology will obliterate their business model; Battery storage.  Right now batteries are not quite cheap enough for most uses but the next wave will get us there.  Keep your eyes on Sodium ion technology, and carbon nano-tubes.  Solar will continue to get cheaper, and there will be a move towards molded panels to fit the homes better, home sized concentrated solar, and plastic and paint based technology.  In 20 years every home will have solar on it.

As an adjunct to solar is the hybrid car.  Now that you can work from your home, your trips are going to be shorter and that allows you to charge up at home.  This will continue to have geopolitical implications as we will not need the amount of gasoline produced, we de-fund the nations that are the most mischievous, and we can start curtailing all of the defense spending we are doing, and redirect it elsewhere.

But there is more. We now can generate drinking water from the ambient air, safely and economically, compared to bottled water, and Teva Gas, out of Israel just released a home sized bioreactor that takes food and animal waste and converts it into cooking/heating gas, and liquid fertilizer.

Pretty amazing.

What I see next as the big opportunity, is using home sensor technology and the internet to allow greater health compliance and monitoring.  We will see smart toilets and smart medicine cabinets to advise, admonish, and alert us to health events and activities.

The home is truly becoming our castle.